Nancy Swanson clearly remembers those first planning meetings held at her house, where she and her colleagues Barbara Goldman and Mari Garza would gather around the kitchen table to map out steps to create their non-profit organization geared to assist children with severe, multiple disabilities.

“We met once a week, and Mari and Barbara would show up with something to eat,” Swanson said. “We had a big easel and would write our mission statement, and discuss how we were going to get contracts, and where we would open a bank account.”

Garza recalled, with amusement, how much they initially deposited into their business account.

“Forty dollars,” she said with a laugh.

To illustrate just how wet behind the ears they were when it came to the business side of things, Goldman said she purchased the “Nonprofit Kit for Dummies.”

“We figured it would give us a starting point,” she said. “In retrospect, it was very helpful and never steered us wrong. It guided us through the entire process of first getting incorporated and then getting a board of directors.”

Fortunately for the 43 children and young adults, ages 2 to 20, whom TEAMability serves, the three women didn’t allow a few bumps in the road to hinder them from pursuing their passion of helping the “invisible population” of San Antonio’s community – as Goldman describes them – and founding the nonprofit in 2003.

The children who come to the TEAMability Learning Center each week suffer from various physical and mental disabilities as a result of being born premature and weighing only two pounds, for instance, or because of brain damage from major illness, trauma, abuse, rare chromosomal abnormalities or shaken baby syndrome, Goldman explained.

Most cannot sit or stand without support, while others cannot swallow or chew and must be fed through tubes inserted in their stomachs. Still, others cannot communicate basic wants and needs.

“They have a lot of sensory, visual and auditory impairments,” Swanson added. “When all these impairments are combined, it becomes a much bigger challenge because of how each disability impacts the other disability.”

Working in tandem, Swanson, a physical therapist; Garza, an occupational therapist; and Goldman, a special education teacher who also is the agency’s executive director use a transdisciplinary approach to help their young clients achieve learning goals.

That method involves combining all three disciplines, or solutions – occupational, physical and educational – to identify each child’s needs and work with them to learn to participate in activities at home, at school or in the community.

“What we each do is bring a body of knowledge to the arena and share that with everyone, and one person might put that through her teacher brain or occupational therapist brain to help come up with a treatment plan for the child,” Swanson said. “It really becomes three heads [are] better than one. We’re very good at figuring out what the child can do. We ask the child to do things we know he or she can do, and that’s a starting point and we build from that.”

Dennis Snyder, a foster parent to Gabriel, 7, and Stephanie, 20, is impressed with the progress his children have made at TEAMability.

“My 7-year-old boy has mental retardation and is blind,” the 63-year-old retired Air Force officer said. “We’ve been working on his pre-communication skills. He did not want to reach out to anyone. Over a course of a year, he’s become more inquisitive and expresses himself through body language. That’s a quantum improvement.”

Stephanie, who suffers from quadriplegic cerebral palsy, “can’t do anything with her body except move her eyes,” Snyder said. “Now she is indicating she wants something.”

TEAMability is having an impact in its work with the children through use of a rail system affixed to the ceiling, which allows for movement. The children are placed in a harness known as a HOPSA dress. Switches are used to allow children to initiate movement, allowing them to independently discover and explore walls, floors and pegboards along the outer perimeter of the room, acquiring sensory input from a variety of sources.

Although this type of rail system has long existed in Europe for in-home use, as well as in rehabilitation facilities, the system is the first in Texas in an educational/therapeutic setting, Goldman said.

“There are kids who just love to move, and it’s all about moving and they don’t care what’s on the wall,” the special education teacher said. “For others, it’s all about beginning to explore and use their hands and faces.”

Garza believes TEAMability fulfills a vital need to the community.

“Parents who have these children have searched high and low not only for help for their child, but also more understanding of their child and what their role is going to be on a daily basis to maximize their child’s potential,” she said. “They confide in us their fears, hopes, frustrations and brick walls they’ve hit in the community. There’s a lot of dashed hopes and dreams.”

Several years before the women founded TEAMability, they worked together in the Harlandale Independent School District at a center for severely disabled children. They discovered that they seemed to have a greater effect on a child’s learning ability when they worked as a team.

“We realized that working together made a lot more sense than separately, which is usually how the system works,” Garza said.

However, their new service model, which combined special education, occupational therapy and physical therapy, wasn’t exactly met with open arms.

“We had a lot of challenges at the school district trying to convince people to understand that working together was for the benefit of the child,” Goldman said. “It wasn’t a brand-new idea. There was evidence that this type of approach worked.”

Soon after, the trio left the district to focus on opening their non-profit organization, which they did in 2003. In the early days, they worked with clients from the Division of Blind Services, creating learning opportunities and doing parent training at homes. They also visited disabled children in rural school districts, such as Hondo, Devine, Stockdale and Medina Valley.

“We would meet in a Bill Miller parking lot, hop into one car and drive around seeing children,” Goldman recalled. 

As a testament to its rapid growth and success, TEAMability today employs seven full-time staffers and two part-time workers. In 2003-2004, its operating budget was $1,000. The projected budget for the 2010-2011 fiscal year is $1 million.

“We never doubted this would work,” Swanson said. “We just charged forward because we knew what we were doing worked for these children, and some parents and some teachers were energized by what we were doing.”

Gordon Hartman, president and CEO of the Gordon Hartman Family Foundation, which supports organizations that serve individuals with cognitive and physical disabilities, offered to mentor the women in growing their organization after reading about TEAMability in a November 2006 San Antonio Express-News article.

“I met with them and found out they are very passionate about what they do and are willing to do whatever it takes to make TEAMability successful,” Hartman said. “They have grown enormously in such a short period of time. It proves to me that if people have the desire and conviction, there is no limit to what they can accomplish.”

As Swanson, Garza and Goldman sit inside their small, shared office, the executive director points out that part of their future plans include seeking a bigger building for obvious reasons. She also reflects on the services they provide to both child and parent.

“There are a lot of things that happen here that parents never expected to see,” Goldman said. “It’s a quality of life issue. What we are doing is providing opportunities for children to access their environment to develop their potential. There are tears from parents who never thought their child would do something that most parents consider routine.”

Although the three women work in unison in the best interests of the children, each has her own reason for dedicating her life and talents to the clients of TEAMability.

“I feel this is a privilege I have been given with the right partners to figure out how to meet the needs of these children with the tools we’ve been given,” Garza said.

“It’s my opportunity to have an impact on somebody’s life,” Swanson added.

“As a parent and a teacher, I look at these children and see the potential. I know that all children can learn, and I have the skills to affect learning,” Goldman said.

As the three founders continue to carry out their mission of providing learning opportunities to those very fragile members of our society, they always can refer to the “Nonprofit Kit for Dummies” for quick advice relating to business matters, if necessary.

“It’s on my shelf at home,” Goldman said, “and I still use it occasionally.”

For more information, call 210-733-9050 or visit www.teamability.org.